Thesis: In this book, author Anne Fadiman offers left-wing cultural analysis that at once takes seriously to the point of coddling absurd ideas from Hmong culture while taking for granted the amazing achievements of Euro-American modernity. As childish and as idiotic as this posture is, her crude criticism helps our organizations become more capable and sophisticated.
The premise of the book is to compare and contrast a kind of spiritual, nature-oriented indigenous culture of the Hmong with impersonal, high-tech western world. These two poles are represented by the Lee family and doctors Neil and Peggy Ernst at Merced Medical Center. This review will focus almost exclusively on the Lee family.
The Lee family are Hmong immigrants, who bring with them from Laos to Merced California, via a refugee camp in Thailand, pre-modern pagan beliefs about the universe. In Laos, before the victory of the communist Pathet Lao in the Laotian Civil War, the Hmong were able to live close to the earth in the mountains, where they practiced slash-and-burn agriculture. Slash-and-burn farming is a practice in which workers clear cut a mountain side, then burn the debris, which results in land fertilized by ash. These fields are farmable for about two or three years, which means that the Hmong were semi-nomadic: they lived in a certain area until all of the farmable land became unusable. Once the land was no longer farmable, the little village would pack up their things and move onto a new area. If it weren’t for the victory of the Pathet Lao, they would presumably continue to live this way in the 21st century.
Fadiman glosses over this next detail, but it is important: one of communism’s–at least Marxist-Leninism’s–few virtues is its concern for modernization. In my own reading about communism, I’ve come to understand it less as an economic concept and more as a historical concept: where it develops, it seeks, above all, to move certain historical processes (radically) forward, sometimes economic processes, sometimes social processes, sometimes agricultural or industrial processes, sometimes racial processes, etc. Of course, what “forward” means is up for interpretation: is it really progress to seize land from productive farmers in Zimbabwe and redistribute it to incompetent farmers? Still, some things really aren’t so ambiguous. It is perfectly reasonable, for instance, to suppress the inefficient and environmentally devastating practice of slash-and-burn agriculture, and Pathet Lao probably would have done so. Agricultural modernization was an attack on the Hmong “way of life,” according to the Hmong, so they cooperated with the United States’s efforts (the so-called “Secret War”) to fight communism in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War period.
Cut to the 1990s. The United States has–surprise, surprise–absorbed a huge number of Hmong refugees. A major percentage of these refugees are both illiterate and innumerate–the central characters of this book, for instance, could not even read the numbers on a digital thermometer. Hmong in the US also move from state to state in search of the most generous welfare policies, which is why there are major Hmong communities in both California and Minnesota (one wonders if the Somalification of Minnesota has something to do with this same phenomenon). The Hmong had a fertility rate of something like nine children per woman in the United States in the 1990s; meanwhile, of course, unemployment for the men was extremely high.
As a way of making an excuse for these objectionable contradictions, Fadiman brings up the perception among some Hmong that lifetime welfare is owed to their entire ethnic group because of their cooperation with the US military during the 1960s: the so-called “promise” made by some unknown CIA figure.
Here’s the reality: the Hmong are not “differently ethical,” as described by Fadiman. Those described in the book appear to me as a garden variety pre-modern, tribal people, who are loyal to clan and “big men.” The Lee family believes that one daughter slammed a door, which scared the soul out of their daughter Lia. This lost soul problem is the source of the significant seizure condition that ultimately takes the child’s life, though only after years of non-compliance with the doctors at the Merced hospital, who were utterly swamped with similar Hmong patients, routinely described as having an almost pathological lack of affect. At the same time, the Lees routinely sacrificed cows and chickens in or near their house in an attempt to lead Lia’s wandering spirit back to her body, which they believe might have gone back to Laos or Thailand and become lost. Further, the Laotian Civil War was not “the American war that forced them to leave Laos.” It was the culmination of decades, if not a century, of history within Laos. The Hmong were on the losing side. The royal family was arrested, and the former king, queen, and prince died in communist labor camps; if not for the United States, the Hmong would have, too. During the war, the Hmong worked with the United States and allied monarchist forces because they absolutely had to. The communists would have shut down their superstitious paganism and their slash-and-burn agriculture–that is, in part, the point of communist education or reeducation: to bring the entire country, including groups like the Hmong, into the present. The United States, which was fighting communism in Asia as a service to humanity in general, does not owe anything to the Hmong. It did its best to fight the enemies of the Hmong, and some Hmong also fought in the same conflict. The Hmong did this because their lives depended on it. If anything, they owe the United States a debt of gratitude.
This is just one of a number of significant issues that Fadiman glosses over in her attempt to make Hmong people appear reasonable to the NPR audience that she surely targeted for this book. Others include–above all–the question of IQ: the Lees cannot speak any English at all after decades in the United States, for instance. Fadiman leaves this astonishing fact largely unremarked upon. She does, on the other hand, discuss the Hmong’s extreme ethno-nationalism, which results in their viewing outsiders–that is, US citizens–with almost schizophrenic suspicion. But, of course, she frames this disposition as defiant and heroic and the result of strength and grit.
In the end, Fadiman’s embrace of the Hmong strikes me as a means of casting America as a soulless, racist wasteland in contrast to a romanticized, “innocent” outsider ethnic group. Ultimately, it was a tiresome book written to inspire in NPR ladies ecstasies of self reflection.